Yucatan-Style grilled chicken with Baked Rice and a Sauvignon Blanc is seen in Napa, Calif. on Monday May 16th, 2011.Yucatan-Style grilled chicken with Baked Rice and a Sauvignon Blanc is seen in Napa, Calif. on Monday May 16th, 2011.
Ran on: 06-26-2011
Mateo Granados' wine-friendly Yucatan-style grilled chicken. Granados' restaurant is scheduled to open in late summer.
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Yucatan-Style grilled chicken with Baked Rice and a Sauvignon Blanc is seen in Napa, Calif. on Monday May 16th, 2011.Yucatan-Style grilled chicken with Baked Rice and a Sauvignon Blanc is seen in Napa, Calif. ... more

Twenty-two years ago, Mateo Granados came to San Francisco from southern Mexico and found a job as a dishwasher in a Richmond District restaurant. Up to that point, his story wasn't much different from that of dozens of other young men from Oxkutzcab, the rural Yucatecan village where he and many other Bay Area immigrants grew up.

But with the help of mentors, Granados made a steady ascent through local fine-dining kitchens, culminating with the title of executive chef at Healdsburg's Dry Creek Kitchen. Along the way, smitten by wine, he added a winemaking stint to his resume.

Now this passionate cook has come full circle, preparing to open a Healdsburg restaurant specializing in the Yucatecan street food of his childhood and, in the interim, running a roving pop-up restaurant at Dry Creek Valley wineries. As a wine-savvy Mexican chef making California-influenced modern Yucatecan food with French technique, Granados appears to have a culinary niche all to himself.

"I totally fell in love with cooking," says the 45-year-old chef, who played soccer and baseball professionally in Mexico until injuries sidelined him.

Soon after his San Francisco arrival, he made a key friend who helped shape his future. Mike Bonaccorsi was the sommelier at Masa's and a friend of the owner of Cafe Maisonette, where Granados washed dishes. Bonaccorsi and Burt Williams, co-proprietor of Williams Selyem winery, would come into the restaurant after hours to taste wines with the owner, and sometimes they would invite Granados to taste, too.

Bonaccorsi noted that the young immigrant had a perceptive palate and helped him land a low-level kitchen job at Masa's with chef Julian Serrano. Granados stayed for seven years.

"Julian was very, very tough with me," recalls Granados. "He said, 'I know you have talent and you can do more than what you are doing.' "

Serrano taught him how to pare vegetables in the French manner - a technique known as "turning" - by practicing relentlessly with a raw egg and a paring knife.

"He said, 'In three weeks, you're going to be a monster,' and in three weeks I was a vegetable-turning machine," says Granados. "It was just like being an athlete. You practice and practice and practice."

Serrano remembers Granados as a wild young man who was difficult to control.

"I hired him because I could see he had the passion," says Serrano, now a chef in Las Vegas. "In those days, we worked 12- to 14-hour days and that was never a problem for him."

In 1996, Granados left Masa's for a short-lived stint on the opening team at Rubicon, then jumped to Alain Rondelli, the high-end San Francisco establishment. After six months there, he was ready to leave the city. Williams, who had been following Granados' career, thought he might thrive in Sonoma County and offered him a crush job at Williams Selyem.

Return to cooking

But Granados missed cooking, and within a year was behind a stove again - this time at Manka's in Inverness, where he ran the kitchen; then back to Masa's as chef de cuisine; and, finally, to Charlie Palmer's Dry Creek Kitchen. Serrano helped him secure a monthlong internship at an avant-garde Madrid restaurant, an experience that made him restless and eager to be on his own.

He left Dry Creek Kitchen and, in 2003, began selling handmade Yucatan-style banana-leaf tamales at farmers' markets and late-night music concerts.

"Julian called me and said, 'Are you losing it? A guy with so much talent and now you're selling tamales on the street?' " Granados recalls. "And why not? It's not embarrassing. I want to do the best tamales in the world."

Mobile kitchen

Since that break with fine dining, Granados has built up his mobile kitchen and expanded his menu. He does Mexican-style breakfasts - tamales, huevos rancheros, eggs with beans - at the Sebastopol, Santa Rosa and Healdsburg farmers' markets. Last year, launched his Tendejon de la Calle - street stall - evenings at Dry Creek wineries such as Preston and Quivira.

"Where I grew up, on every corner you saw tendejones," says Granados, referring to the temporary food stands that Yucatecan families might erect after they have dispatched a pig or a few chickens. "When you need the money, you slaughter the animal and make cochinita pibil or escabeche. Everybody sells food."

His brief Tendejon menus are a la carte and based rigorously on local ingredients. A recent Friday dinner at Preston included roast spring lamb and pork from animals raised on the premises; a farro-like side dish of red wheat that winery owner Lou Preston grows for his bread-making; beets, tatsoi, strawberries and herbs from the Preston garden; cured olives from the winery's trees; eggs from Preston chickens; Fort Bragg wild salmon; and chiles and zucchini from nearby Tierra Farms. Diners sat on folding chairs or wooden benches at long oilcloth-covered tables, and ate by the light of votive candles and lanterns once night fell.

Doing his roving dinners at wineries allows Granados to drive home a favorite message: that Latin food can indeed go with wine. Authentic Yucatecan cuisine with its incendiary habanero salsa? Maybe not. But Granados' hybrid style, which riffs on Yucatecan classics using French technique, leaves plenty of room for a gutsy bottle of Preston Zinfandel.

"We're not putting heat forward," says Granados about his culinary approach. "We're moving the heat back." Adding a pig's foot to a sauce, for example, contributes viscosity that softens the impact of chiles. The chef also relies on the intense flavor and body of reduced stock to push the heat in a sauce to the background.

Lessons learned

Granados says he learned a lot about cooking from his winemaking experiences, which included time with Williams' son, Fred, at another winery. He chooses his produce, meat and fish purveyors as rigorously as winemakers select grape sources.

"When you pick is important," says Granados. "If I'm doing a cherry tomato salad, I say (to the grower), 'Can you stop the water two weeks before so we have the concentration?' Then I just put good olive oil and queso fresco, and my job is done. What I learned from Burt Williams is, if you use high quality, you can't go wrong."

Working in this reporter's Napa Valley kitchen, he demonstrated some of the dishes he serves occasionally at Tendejon de la Calle: a Yucatan-style grilled chicken marinated overnight with achiote paste and lemon (sour orange would be the choice in Oxkutzcab); baked rice with green onions (he used green garlic, no longer in season); and a flan baked with slices of day-old sticky bun from a Healdsburg bakery. In reference, perhaps, to his apprenticeship at the contemporary Madrid restaurant, he topped off the flan with a foam of goat's milk cajeta.

Mateo's Cocina Latina, serving Yucatecan-style street food, is scheduled to open in Healdsburg in late summer.

-- Recipes on H4.

Yucatan-Style Grilled Chicken (Gallina con Achiote)

Serves 4

This recipe provides enough marinade for a whole chicken cut into serving pieces, although Granados prefers to use leg-thigh quarters. He removes the thigh bone before marinating, an optional step. Grilling the chicken slowly over indirect heat produces a crusty skin and juicy interior.

4 chicken leg-thigh quarters

1/2 cup achiote paste (see Note)

1/2 cup fresh lemon juice

1 tablespoon + 1 teaspoon sea salt

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

For serving

-- Hot tortillas

-- Pickled red onions

-- Shredded romaine lettuce or cabbage

-- Sliced radishes or tomatoes

Instructions: Put the chicken parts in a non-reactive container, such as a glass baking dish. In a small bowl, combine the achiote paste, lemon juice and salt and use your fingers to blend the mixture until it is smooth. Strain the mixture through a fine sieve over the chicken, then turn the chicken in the marinade to coat all sides. Cover and refrigerate for 24 hours, turning it in the marinade halfway through.

Prepare a medium-hot charcoal fire or preheat a gas grill to medium-high. Create an area for indirect grilling: if cooking with charcoal, bank the coals under one-half of the grill rack or make a ring of coals with a bare space in the center; with a gas grill, leave one burner unlit.

Remove the chicken from the marinade to a platter. Drizzle with the olive oil and rub the oil evenly over the chicken parts with your hands.

Place the chicken on the grill, skin side down, over indirect heat. Cover the grill, leaving vents open. Cook, turning once, until the chicken is appetizingly browned on both sides and no longer pink at the bone, 25 to 30 minutes. Let the chicken rest 10 minutes before serving.

To serve, wrap some grilled chicken in a tortilla with any or all of the accompaniments.

Note: Achiote paste is available at Mexican markets.

Nutrition information: The calories and other nutrients absorbed from marinades and syrups vary and are difficult to estimate. Therefore, this recipe contains no analysis.

Wine pairing: Mateo Granados recommends the 2006 Valdez Sonoma County Sauvignon Blanc ($22, 14% alcohol), though newer vintages may be available. Its citrus and tropical-fruit aromas remind him of the pineapple salsa his mother would serve with her achiote-marinated chicken.

Baked Rice with Spring Onions (Arroz Horneado)

Makes about 7 cups; serves 6

Granados likes the texture of medium-grain Spanish Calasparra rice in this dish although long-grain rice is traditional in the Yucatan.

1 large tomato

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

1 cup minced spring onions or green onions (including green leaves)

2 cups Spanish Calasparra rice or Italian Arborio or Carnaroli rice

1 large clove garlic, minced

1 1/2 teaspoons sea salt

1 3/4 cups boiling water

Instructions: In a preheated broiler, broil the tomato, turning once, until the skin blisters and blackens in spots. Let cool, then peel, core and puree the tomato in a blender or food processor. (Makes about 3/4 cup puree.)

Reset the oven temperature to 350°.

Heat a 2- to 3- quart Dutch oven or similar heavy pot over medium-high heat. Add the oil. When the oil is hot, add the spring onions and rice and saute briskly, stirring constantly, for about 2 minutes to toast the rice lightly. Add the garlic and saute briefly to release its fragrance. Add the tomato puree, salt and boiling water. Cover and transfer to the oven. Bake for 15 minutes, then remove from the oven and let stand, covered, for 10 minutes. Fluff with a fork before serving.

Warm Sticky Bun Flan With Cajeta Cream (Flan con Pan Incrustado)

Granados uses the sticky buns from Healdsburg's Downtown Bakery for this bread pudding-like dessert. The pastries that some bakeries call "morning buns" are a good alternative.

1 day-old sticky bun or morning bun, in 6 slices

2 cups whole milk

1/2 cup sugar

3 whole eggs plus 2 egg yolks

1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract

Cajeta Cream:

1/2 cup whipping cream

2 tablespoons cajeta (goat's milk caramel)

Instructions: Preheat the oven to 325° and place a rack in the middle of the oven. Put a slice of sticky bun in each of 6 four-ounce ramekins. Place the ramekins in a 13- by 9- by 2-inch baking dish. In a small pot, boil about 3 cups of water to be used later.

In a small saucepan, bring the milk and sugar to a simmer over moderate heat, whisking until the sugar dissolves.

In a bowl, whisk together the eggs, yolks, and vanilla. Whisk in the hot milk gradually. Strain the mixture through a fine sieve, then divide the mixture among the 6 ramekins. If the slice of sticky bun floats, poke it down into the custard. Add enough boiling water to the baking dish to come halfway up the sides of the ramekins. Cover the baking dish with foil and carefully transfer to the middle rack of the oven.

Bake until the custard feels firm to the touch, about 25 minutes. Transfer ramekins to a rack to cool for about 30 minutes.

For the Cajeta Cream: Whisk the whipping cream by hand to soft peaks. Add the cajeta and stir with the whisk until the cajeta dissolves.

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